Philosophy for Geeks, part 1

In 2003, I started, hmm, not a daily journal so much as a daily scribble. I toyed with the idea of calling it “The Philosophy of Onions” or just “Onions.” Perhaps I would have if I weren’t afraid that it would end up in the Agriculture section of the bookstore. 2014 addition: The prior sentence was written when there were such things as bookstores. 2019 addition: It was also written when I was laboring under the delusion that this thing might be published. More fool me. I will start dating each entry in one of the later parts. For now, each "paragraph" represents the writing for a single day.

I don’t really mind offending you. Maybe I even hope that I will. But not by something so mundane as my always writing either “he” or “she” rather than “he/she” (or some variant). It is very tedious (silly, even) to write: “The worker is the heart of our society. He or she will ever find himself (or herself) needed.” My beliefs regarding the equality of women are not supposed to be an issue here, so relax and let it be. 2019 addition: The furor over pronouns seems to grow every day, to the degree that “he,” “she,” and “he/she” are small potatoes. In my first and second updates to the original version of this particular daily scribble, I wrote two different 500-word essays about . . . No, that was the beginning of the third. Things change. The original scribble represents my thinking in 2003.

I can’t abide self-help books. This is not one. How can a book claim to create a change in you? How can you believe it? If it isn’t in you in the first place, a book won’t put it there.

I read a few of the Greek philosophers when I was around 25 or 26. What struck me most was not the timelessness of what they wrote but that times were really different.

We are all onions. Everything is an onion of sorts: There is always another layer. Peel off the top and find another. On and on.

You will find the answers to most of your questions in the books of Kurt Vonnegut. You will find the answers to many of your questions (with some overlap) in the books of Tom Robbins. You will find all your nightmares made flesh in the books of Harlan Ellison.

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t set out to be a philosopher, I assume. But all his work taken together is as complete a philosophy as Socrates or Aristotle ever produced.

M. Scott Peck, MD, wrote a book called “The Road Less Traveled.” In it he said, “Life is difficult.” Now, though this is a direct quote, I haven’t actually read the book. My mom told me about it, marveling (I thought at the time) that someone could be so direct. I tend to agree with the statement but would like to add that life is also pretty cool. Not having read the book, I certainly can’t say that Dr. Peck didn’t include that message, but just in case he didn’t, here you go: “Life is difficult, but it’s also pretty cool.”

Every event is fiction the millisecond after it occurs. Everything I write is a fiction of sorts. A story that my mind has invented to talk about and illustrate the world I see.

I prefer to write fiction, but since everything we write is fiction, I have no trouble pleasing myself.

George Washington cutting down a cherry tree and not telling a lie really is fiction and not the fiction that we call history. In the end, it doesn’t make a whit of difference. Why is this important? Everything that happened, even when witnessed directly, immediately became subject to the attitudes, beliefs, weaknesses, education, and so on of the observer. In the telling, it was impossible for the teller to refrain from coloring the event with his personality. The thing to do is forget trying to figure how accurate someone’s account is and hear what it can teach.

When I was in high school, my trigonometry teacher told us a story about the difference between a mathematician and an engineer. “A mathematician," he said, "and an engineer are both standing six feet from a table full of food. Neither has eaten for a couple of days and the pangs of hunger are pretty severe. They are told that they can eat all the food they want as soon as they get to the table but that to do so, they can only take steps equal to half the distance of their current position. At six feet, they must take a three-foot step, at three feet, one of one-and-a-half feet, and so on. The mathematician immediately sits down in despair, giving up all will to live. The engineer smiles, whips out a tape measure, and marks out the first three-foot step. When asked why he has given up, the mathematician wails, ‘Because if we can only make the approach halving each step, then we will never arrive.’ The engineer, looking up from the floor as he measures eight inches on his tape adds, smiling, ‘Yeah, but that’s close enough for me.’”

How can you claim to know another? Few people can honestly claim to know themselves. How then can you feel that you have such intimate knowledge of another that you “know them”? On a daily basis, we do things that we can’t explain to ourselves, let alone to another. For well over a year I persisted in communicating by email with strangers. People who answered a classified ad that I (in a fit of solitary desperation) posted. I already knew from experience that this was a waste of time. So why did I do it? Hope? I don’t know, but unless you can answer that question and many others about me, you have no right to say that you know me. How many questions do you have about yourself that you cannot answer? Can anyone know you who cannot answer those questions and more that have not occurred to you yet?

Everything is random. I realized this after really getting down to the business of composing music. With a slightly educated ear, you can hear the randomness in music. I may not have ever realized it, but I started listening to music very closely. More so than I had before. (Not knowing me, you won’t find it difficult to believe that statement. I, on the other hand, have to wonder whether I’m exaggerating. I’m not.) You see, every rule a composer follows (regardless of the style of music she wants to produce) is a product of years of experience, study, and listening. Study music theory, study composition and you will be taught rules. Neapolitan 6ths, parallel fifths, fifths of fifths. And they are all arbitrary and human defined. One day a monk, calling in sick from his cell and listening to the chanting of his fellows, realized that a note sung a certain interval above another had a pleasing sound. The third is born. But that was in western civilization. In Chinese music, the same pleasantness was attributed to the interval we call a fourth. Which interval to western-educated ears sounds variously empty, ominous, or regal. So? If it is a man-made thing, then it will be pleasing to some or many. No, it will affect, in a more or less predetermined way, some or many. But not universally. Someone will always be able to see/hear/smell/experience a thing that everyone else will call beautiful/horrible/terrifying and not be the least moved. To him that beauty/horror/terror is nothing more than a random grouping of . . . whatever. I was listening to a Beethoven piano sonata when I realized that you could change any element—the notes, the rhythms, the tempos, the harmonic structures—and it still could be a phenomenal piece of music (though not the Moonlight Sonata). It would be different, yes. But if the purpose of music is to communicate in a way that cannot be done with only words, then the Moonlight Sonata could be made to succeed even if it were in 4/4 time and a major key. If you choose a note or a rhythm or a harmony based on the strictest rules of composition, it still is as random as dropping a quarter on a keyboard six times and making the six keys you hit “the melody.” (I think I’ll try that some time.) The Moonlight Sonata remains today one of the all-time great pieces for piano. But I love sunsets, leaves jumping in the rain, the shouts of my playing children, and when my checkbook balances the first time. Are you going to try to tell me those are planned events? Choreographed? Maybe beauty is only the beholder’s internal act of imposing a pattern on chaos.

A good psychiatrist will tell you that he cannot specifically “fix you up.” Help you to find the way to do it yourself, certainly. Psychiatrists are not maintenance men of the mind.

Black and white are fallacies. Both as colors and as concepts. No matter how black a thing looks, it always contains a speck (even if only a speck) of color. Alternately, no matter how white a thing appears, it is a shade of grey. No matter how light. Perfection does not exist. We need to take a lesson from the engineer and the mathematician and let ourselves be close enough.

I am a Geek. Not the chicken-head-consuming type and not even the type who (in high school) strode around with a pocket protector, black-rimmed glasses, and a book bag greater than his own body weight. I am the Universal Geek. Like Einstein was a Geek and like Lincoln was a Geek. It seems as if I’m putting myself in exalted company. Not at all. We recognize the famous Geeks because they are famous. I could say that I’m a Geek like Steve Isaac is a Geek, only you would have no idea what that means since you don’t know Steve Isaac (anyway, name changed to protect the geeky). Fame imparts no Geekhood. Geekhood does not automatically bring fame. The world is full of Geeks. We’re the misfits, weirdos, hermits, misanthropes, outcasts. We are frequently misunderstood, under-appreciated, despised, feared, ignored. Many of us are creative or beautiful or brilliant (though few of us on the level of an Einstein). Some Geeks are just geeks.